The phone rang too early for it to be good news. Stein pulled himself out of a blurry sleep onto one elbow and waited with dread to hear his ex-wife’s voice on the answering machine with an urgent message about some appointment she had forgotten to tell Stein about that would require his rearranging his schedule to accommodate her. Their joint custody arrangements were already as gerrymandered as a crooked political district. Angie, their fifteen-year-old daughter, stayed with Stein half the week and alternate weekends, then with Hillary the rest of the time unless something unexpected came up, which it almost always did. All these years divorced and he was still her first call in any crisis. It drove him nuts.
But it was not Hillary calling. It was worse in a different way. It was Mrs. Higgit from the warehouse. Her voice cut through him like a fish knife. There was a serious problem, she was saying. The inventory count of shampoo bottles that Mister Stein had just completed was short by a thousand cases from the amount the computer said should be on hand. Mister Mattingly was extremely upset and wishes Mister Stein-on to call back promptly. Mrs. Higgit put extra syllables into words to emphasize their importance. She pronounced Stein as if it rhymed with lion.
Stein sat perfectly still lest his breathing betray his presence. He had spent the last fourteen days in an airless warehouse hand-counting a quarter-million empty octagonal plastic designer shampoo bottles. His skin reeked of polypropylene. It leeched out of his hair, permeated his sheets. He smelled like he had been stored in Tupperware. So, no. He was not going to call back promptly.
He creaked out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweats. The framed picture of him with John and Yoko taken twenty-five years ago today-on his twenty-fifth birthday-hung on the wall above his dresser. Half his life had passed since then, and nineteen years to the day since John had been killed, December 8, 1980. Stein’s beard in the photograph was longer than his hair was now. He felt the ghost of his amputated ponytail. He padded down the hallway to Angie’s room and knocked.
“Are you up?” He tried to make the prospect sound pleasant.
Her monosyllabic answer splattered against the inside of her door like a thrown object. “NO.”
“And good morning to you, too,” he bowed, and continued down the stairs to make her breakfast.
Stein’s ancient arthritic terrier, Watson, had peed on the tile floor again, so on Stein’s first step into the kitchen his leg skated out from under him and he had to grab onto the counter to keep from wish-boning. His flailing arm knocked over the container of milk that Angie had left out despite Stein’s reminding her a dozen times the previous night to put it away, and her assurance that she would. A stream of white lava flowed along the counter toward the rack of washed dishes. Stein lunged from his knees and just managed to swoop the dish rack up before the advancing white liquid tongue lapped over its edge. He knelt there in full extension, holding up the dish rack like an offering from a supplicant at the altar of Chaos. He wondered who those people were whose mornings began with freshly squeezed orange juice, pressed shirts and a crisply folded newspaper.
Watson was asleep alongside the heater vent in the living room. Stein unwound his leash from the front door handle. The sound awakened in him a deep Pavlovian response, and he tried gamely to scramble to his feet. His lame hind legs splayed out behind him like someone trying to use chopsticks for the first time. Stein gently lifted Watson’s bony, urine-stinking rear end and wheel barrowed him down the front steps into the semi-circular courtyard of their cozy little fourplex in the Fairfax District. It was a dank and cool morning for Los Angeles. Two joggers in their sixties clomped through the mist discussing their portfolios. One was in diversified mutual funds and wore hundred dollar Reeboks. The other had a headband and rental property. Stein had ten extra pounds around his middle and no investments. Watson could no longer lift his leg and had to squat like a girl.
The phone was ringing again as Stein eased Watson up the stairs and back inside. This time it was the voice of Mattingly himself on the machine. Stein could see the squeezed throat and pinched lips that produced the panic in Mattingly’s voice. He was sure the missing bottles had been hijacked and that a knock-off version of his Espe “New Millennium” shampoo was going to hit the streets before the release of the real thing. He implored Stein to please please please please please call in as soon as he could.
People like Mattingly sapped Stein’s soul. Wasn’t it obvious that a discrepancy as neat as a thousand cases was not going to be the result of a ‘hijack’ but rather a transposed decimal point in one of a hundred tedious mathematical operations? Stein had enough trouble explaining the world to his daughter; he wasn’t going to waste time on strangers. Especially strangers who made fifty times what he made.
Angie’s platform shoes clomped across her bedroom floor above his head, and Stein realized he hadn’t started her breakfast yet. He poured a teaspoon of olive oil into a cast-iron frying pan and diced an onion to brown. Then he cut up the leftover baked potato from last night’s dinner into little squares and threw them in with the onions to make home fries. Getting into a good rhythm, he heated the griddle and whisked the egg white into a bowl of pancake batter then added his secret ingredient, vanilla extract, and ladled the first batch onto the skillet.
“Hey, Dad.”
Angie tromped into the kitchen and splayed her books out across the table. Her hair was reddish-orange today. Stein became agitated when he saw her doing homework. “You told me you finished everything last night before I let you watch TV.”
“I forgot we had a history paper.”
“You forgot?”
“Comparing Woodstock and Woodstock II.”
“Your school legitimizes Woodstock II? Woodstock II was a completely bogus event staged by people who were too busy making money to be at the real Woodstock.”
“Chill, Dad. It’s only school.”
“It’s not only school. Philosophically, there can’t be anything ‘II.’ Every moment is its own discrete event. Would you call ten minutes from now NOW II?”
“What about Home Alone II? Or Shrek II?”
“That’s just my point.”
“What about World War II?”
“What about telling the truth when I ask you about school work?”
“Something’s burning.”
Stein whirled around into the kitchen as the pancakes became galvanized into hockey pucks. “Have your juice, I’ll make another batch.” A car horn tooted outside. Angie swept her books up into her backpack and clambered to the door. “Bye Watsie,” she said, in that sweet voice that Stein remembered was once, long ago, also for him.
“Angie. You can’t go to school without breakfast.”
She glanced back at him, standing in the doorway with a spatula and a worried look. “You’re becoming your mother,” she said. Her friends honked again.
“Who’s driving?”
“That underage kid who lost his license for driving drunk.”
“Angie!”
“Pick me up at three-thirty.”
She bounded down the four steps into the courtyard and disappeared through the invisible curtain into her life. Stein didn’t want to be disappointed that she had forgotten his birthday. He wanted to be forgiving and tolerant and to blame Hillary for not reminding her. One of the collateral damages of divorce is the loss of the person who explains your shortcomings in a wawas long and green and gracefuly your children can love. When he saw the envelope sticking partway out of his mail slot he got all gooey inside. Aw. She had remembered after all. Just when you think they’ve let you down, they come through. He opened the envelope without tearing the flap, preserving every part of the gift as an icon. The card was a reproduction of the cover of Stein’s famed underground book on cannabis cultivation from the seventies, Smoke This Book. That made him frown. He had tried to hide that chapter of his life from her. Taped inside the fold of the card was a professionally heat-sealed plastic bag. And inside the bag was a long, graceful, sea-green bud of sinsemilla. The card was unsigned. Ok, so this was not from Angie.
He did not find the joke amusing. Anyone who knew him knew of the Joint Custody agreement that Hillary had rigorously enforced enjoining Stein from engaging in any “actions deleterious to the well being of the child.” Under the threat of losing Angie, Stein had traded in his VW Bus for a Camry, given up old friends, old habits, a pony tail, had taken on an excruciatingly mind-numbing job with a re-insurance company, and had not smoked dope in seven years. It irked him that whoever thought this was so cute should have known better. When the phone rang yet again Stein was too preoccupied and forgot not to answer. “Thank God I caught you,” Mattingly gushed.